In this third and final movement of The Objects of Indulgence, Pastor Ayo Agunloye turns from the outward and visible to the inward and hidden. Having traced indulgence through the body, the mind, the ego, our comforts, and even our spiritual energy, he now follows it into the places no one else can see—our emotions, our habits, and our words and thoughts.
Within the year’s Your Potter’s House theme of cultivating a heart after God’s own heart, these are the weeds: quiet growths that, left unchecked, choke out the very heart we are trying to cultivate.
It is not only possessions or pleasures that enslave a man’s heart. Unchecked emotions, lifeless routines, and idle words can master it just as surely.
The base reading is Proverbs 14, with its golden text close at hand: “A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones” (Proverbs 14:30).
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode Below
This is a searching, interior message, closing with one of the most practical question-and-answer sessions of the series—on how long deliverance takes, and how to speak hard truth without crushing the hearer. Worth a slow, prayerful listen.
😤 Emotional Indulgences: The Heart’s Hidden Traps
The first hidden object is the emotions—anger, lust, infatuation, bitterness, jealousy, resentment. Each one is a trap: easy to walk into, hard to walk out of. To “feel like” getting angry when wronged, and simply give the feeling its way, is to answer the call of the flesh—because “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).
Indulged feeling masquerades as self-expression, as justification, even as passion—while it quietly governs your decisions, your reactions, and your devotion to God.
But the believer is not left to white-knuckle resolve. Grace itself “teaches us to deny ungodliness” (Titus 2:11–12), and no temptation comes without a God-given way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). The honest response, the pastor urges, is to go to your knees and confess the feeling exactly as it is—“this is how I am feeling; I cannot help myself; I need Your help.” Even Christ “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7).
On anger specifically, Pastor Agunloye draws a careful distinction from “Be ye angry, and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26): the command, he argues, is be angry and sin not—anger directed at sin and the works of Satan, as Christ’s was—not the human temper that cannot coexist with righteousness. And he points to Peter, whose denial came not from his clear mind but from the grip of fear:
Emotion holds a tight rope. It makes a person lose his senses. That is why, the moment it pulls, the cry must be: “Lord, hold me, so that I do not fall.”
🔁 Habits and Routines: The Quiet Indulgence
The second hidden object is the most respectable—our habits and routines. A disciple may wear discipline and consistency as a badge while lawful, even spiritual, routines quietly run on autopilot, dulling sensitivity rather than feeding the soul. The text is “present your bodies a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1).
The pastor’s example is disarmingly ordinary: blessing your food. Done by reflex, with the heart absent, it becomes a custom that has lost its freshness and power. The same can happen to Bible reading and prayer performed “with ease, without diligence”—forgetting that God “is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6), not of those who seek Him indulgently.
He anchors it in the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5). Crowds jostled Jesus, yet He asked, “Who touched me?”—because pressing against Him is not the same as touching Him in faith.
It is possible to walk with Jesus and never truly touch Him—to do things for Him, routinely and lifelessly, and receive nothing.
The danger is “a form of godliness” that denies its power (2 Timothy 3:5)—stability in form, barrenness in spirit. The remedy is to examine the patterns: how you eat, work, rest, pray, and serve, and to refuse to be enslaved by mere habit or convenience.
🗣️ Speech and Thoughts: The Unseen Indulgences
The third hidden object is the tongue and the imagination, where “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21; James 3:1–12).
Gossip is the clearest case—slipping into a conversation about someone’s faults and beginning to enjoy it, even sweetening the account to make it tastier. The pastor offers a sharp test:
Can you spend as much time praying for the person as you spent talking about them? Gossip becomes indulgence the moment you begin to enjoy it.
Then come harsh words—truth divorced from grace. Recalling last week’s “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), he insists the two are not separate gifts but one gift held out with two hands. Truth must indeed be spoken raw and undecorated—but the one who delights in delivering it bluntly, never feeling its sting, is indulging himself. As the Yoruba proverb warns, try the pin on yourself before piercing another. He pictures it as surgery: the knife of truth must cut, but grace is the anesthesia that eases the pain without removing the necessary cut. The opposite error is just as real—the hyper-grace heart that wants affirmation only and brands every correction as judgment.
Finally, idle imagination—fantasies and daydreams that spend real hours on things that will never be. The counsel is the same throughout: watch the patterns of complaint, criticism, self-pity, and fantasy, and let the heart become a sanctuary where words and thoughts honour God.
⏱️ “How Long Does It Take?” — A Listener’s Question
A listener asks how long it typically takes to overcome these emotional and mental indulgences. The pastor’s answer is freeing and convicting at once: there is no fixed timetable—it depends entirely on your yieldedness and seriousness.
He points again to Christ, who prayed with strong crying and tears (Hebrews 5:7), and to the rebuke in Hebrews 12:4—“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” His vivid illustration: no matter how thirsty you are, you will not drink poison, because you can plainly see it would kill you.
The day you see a sin for the poison it really is, you stop negotiating with it. Until then, you treat deliverance as “maybe tomorrow”—and that delay is itself an indulgence.
Determination, he says, is what drives a person to confess, seek counsel, gain knowledge, and pray their way to freedom.
⚖️ Speaking Truth Without Compromise — A Second Question
A second listener raises the hard pastoral problem: truth is bitter, and the person enjoying his sin hears every correction as condemnation. How do we present it without compromising?
You cannot fully prevent that reaction, the pastor concedes—but you can follow Christ’s order. Grace came first with Jesus, yet many heard only the bitter half and missed it. In John 6 He preached a “hard saying” and many disciples left; He did not lower the standard to keep them, but turned to the Twelve—“Will ye also go away?”
There is no one-size-fits-all formula. Truth must be said as truth—raw, never watered down, or it loses its power. But grace must back it up.
And the grace, he explains, is largely relationship: people do not care what you know until they know how much you care. That love becomes the platform truth can land on—the anesthesia for the knife. His model is Nathan before David(2 Samuel 12): the gentle parable first, then the unflinching “Thou art the man,” and the king broke. Grace is not the softening of truth; it is the care, the offered solution, and the willingness to walk with the person through restoration, so they know you have not merely come to condemn.
🌟 Final Reflection
“The Objects of Indulgence (III)” completes the month by hunting indulgence into its last hiding places—the feelings we excuse, the routines we trust, the words and daydreams no one overhears. And it draws the whole series to a single point: the heart after God’s heart is not one that feels less, does less, or says less, but one that keeps its inner life—emotion, habit, and speech alike—surrendered to God and balanced by grace and truth together.
The same grace-and-truth that we are to receive from Christ, we are to extend to others and impose on ourselves: nothing harsh, nothing flattering—everything whole.
The episode closes in prayer:
“Lord, give us grace to receive the truth in humility, and grace, when we are the ones who must tell it, to speak it with gentleness, love, and mercy. Deliver us from every form of indulgence; help us to identify it, and to resist it, reject it, and refuse it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
This is a message to take inward.
Listen again. Examine the hidden places. And ask God for the grace to bring every feeling, habit, and word home to His heart.